Lunch in Paris (27 page)

Get a job

Make some friends

Find a dentist

Buy some mothballs

Get a life

This kind of inquisition began during my first winter in London. On a drizzly evening after dinner my mother and I were upstairs
in my bedroom in the narrow brick town house in Islington that I shared with an English lawyer and an American day trader.
While I put away laundry, my mother was fingering the curtains.

“I know. They’re disgusting,” I said, as I arranged my T-shirts in the sagging walnut veneer armoire that served as my closet.
She continued to inspect the heavy mustard-colored velour. The curtains were pleated, to trap as much dust as possible, with
a dangling plastic pulley I could tug to let in some daylight. They were supposed to keep out the draft. I imagine they’d
been doing just that—uninterrupted by a trip to the dry cleaner—since 1963.

“Why can’t we
just
go and buy some new curtains?” she said. “We can go now.” I looked at my alarm clock; it was nine p.m. on a Sunday.

The comment made me instantly and disproportionately furious. It was as if my mother didn’t realize she’d gotten on a plane
at all. There are exactly
three
stores in central London that sell curtains,
all
of them are on the other side of the earth, and
none
of them is even
close
to being open at nine p.m. on a Sunday night. Do you see a car? Do you see a shopping mall? Is there a Bed Bath & Beyond
between here and the Angel tube station? No, no, and no, we can’t
just
go and buy some new curtains.

I knew I was being short. Yes, certain things, lots of things, were easier in the United States. But we
weren’t
in the United States. I was still American, and the hideous asthma-inducing curtains frustrated me too. But I had made a
choice, and it had nothing to do with convenience. My mother did not share my feeling of awe as I stepped into the hushed
rotunda of the British Library with my reader’s card for the first time. She didn’t linger with me over the glass cases filled
with illegible inky scratchings, the handwritten letters and manuscripts of Milton, Shelley, and Auden. She didn’t come with
me two or three times a week when I popped in to see my favorite painting at the National Gallery, a Rubens portrait of a
wealthy merchant in his gossamer ruff, a dab of white paint shining from the corner of his eye like a freshly formed tear.
There were reasons, private reasons, why I was here, and—I guess this was the hardest part—none of them had anything to do
with her. Europe was all the ways in which I wanted my life to be different from my parents’, all the things they couldn’t
give me. At least in London she could understand the language. Paris was just one step further away, into my own world, one
she couldn’t fully participate in.

If I was touchy in London, at the moment I was downright electric—positively
third-rail
sensitive—about Paris. This was not a semester abroad, a holiday, a tryout for some future version of my life. This was it.
Yes, the story line thus far was very appealing: I was
young and in love and had my whole life ahead of me. I was living “every girl’s” dream. But I had yet to find my own. I had
yet to find my own passion, my personal project, the thing that would help make Paris
mine
. Until I did, I knew that every comment would set me on edge like the scratch of a fingernail against a chalkboard. My mother
was right. I did need a job, a dentist, and, in general, a life. But I was doing the best I could, and for the time being
at least I couldn’t bear criticism of my choice. I was trying so hard to convince myself it was the right one. I didn’t need
anyone else talking this country down.

But the questions just kept coming, and I had only one exasperating answer. Because I’m
not
in New York, and things
just
don’t work like that here. It’s hard enough trying to build a new life in another culture without having to explain the process
to everyone back home. The journalism was coming in at a very slow trickle—I seemed to spend eighty percent of my time pitching
ideas to editors, twenty percent actually writing. I found that travel articles tended to be written by staffers on vacation
rather than freelancers on the ground. I was getting a piece of art criticism here and there, but mostly in London or New
York, so I spent my fees going back and forth to do interviews and see exhibitions. My mother decided that to pick up the
slack, I should start a museum tour company. Start a company? How could I make her understand that just going to the post
office in Paris was sometimes an all-day project? There were days when each step I took was like wading through a room full
of cold mashed potatoes. The idea of diverting what little energy I had left into a business that was not my ultimate goal
left me wanting to curl up into a little ball and cry.

My mother wasn’t the only one asking questions. My friends back home were asking too. When I called Amanda in LA, we talked
about Yanig, about Gwendal, about my mom. She slowly
tried to bring the conversation around to me. “So, when do you think you’ll be going back to work?”

I didn’t know how to say it any other way:
Honey, this
is
work
.

N
OTHING PRESENTED MORE
opportunities for misunderstandings than dinner.

Anyone who has so much as been on vacation in another country knows that dinner is a loaded concept, full of opportunities
for both heartfelt communication and mortal embarrassment. I first realized this the summer my mother, my friend Sarah, and
I spent in Israel when Sarah and I were twelve. We were renting a small apartment in Jerusalem, and Auntie Lynn joined us
for part of the trip. Auntie Lynn has been my mother’s best friend since they first taught together at Ditmas Junior High
School in Brooklyn in 1965. Lynn left teaching to get a PhD, eventually becoming a corporate trainer and executive coach.
She is a fearless businesswoman, the kind who will promise you a pink private jet out of thin air on Friday afternoon and
somehow have it ready by Monday morning. She stepped off the airplane and immediately whipped us into a frenzy of activity.
She has a naturally low body temperature, so she wore a knit dress with a carefully knotted silk scarf and pearls on our hike
up Mount Masada (I fainted in the Roman baths). One of the items on her busy agenda was an Israeli business contact, Simon,
whom we arranged to meet for dinner. The night before, Sarah and I hand-washed our only skirts in the apartment bathtub. Just
before seven, my mother opened a can of olives and placed them in a glass bowl on the Formica coffee table.

Simon arrived, wearing a sport jacket and pressed khakis. He sat down on the couch. After an hour, the olives had been exhausted
and
Sarah and I politely excused ourselves to go to our room. Another hour passed, the adults still sitting on the sofa making
polite conversation. My mother waited until Auntie Lynn was gesticulating wildly in front of Simon and rolled a jar of peanut
butter and two apples across the tile floor into our bedroom. I don’t like peanut butter, but I ate it anyway. Two hours later,
Simon finally got up to leave, with a bewildered bow. My mother shut the door and raised her eyebrows at Auntie Lynn. Clearly,
we had missed something. We assumed, as two women and two children in a strange land, that surely we would be going
out
for dinner, at a restaurant of Simon’s choosing. He assumed that two women and two children in their own apartment would
be cooking. As my father used to say: “assume” makes an “a-s-s” out of “u” and “m-e.”

Now that we had a real kitchen in Paris and four chairs to sit on, I was eager to impress my parents, show them the part of
my Paris routine I liked the best—shopping and cooking. The apartment was coming along nicely. Gwendal had put in a whole
wall of bookshelves in the bedroom and one of Yanig’s vases, black with a red rim like the mouth of a volcano, was filled
with twisty, droopy
renoncules
.

Making dinner in Paris can be an hours-long affair. Normally, I enjoy this, going from one shop to another, picking up my
walnuts here, my fish there, my bread somewhere else. But with my mother in tow, this routine required a running commentary
and a military schedule. “Just let me finish my coffee,” she would say when she finally arrived at the apartment to pick me
up. “Mom, the market closes at one. If we don’t get there, we’re not going to eat.” “OK, just let me go the bathroom.” Paul,
on the other hand, had discovered the chocolate hazelnut spread Nutella, and was never to be heard criticizing France ever
again.

Walking up the rue du Faubourg du Temple took half an hour. My mother is an even more committed window-shopper than I; she
stopped to look at the cellulite creams in the window of the pharmacy and the prickly durian fruit outside the Chinese grocer.

My accent in French is good enough that the
vendeurs
at the market think I’m something other than American or English, usually Italian, which I take as an enormous compliment.
With my mother at my side, the cat was out of the bag, and they all started speaking in pidgin English.
Hel-lo, hel-lo, lady. Lady. Iz good. Good. No cher. No cher.

I got in line at my usual vegetable stand behind two grannies and a young African woman with a double stroller. “There are
green beans over here,” my mother said, inspecting the half-rotten peppers across the way.

“Yes, but the good green beans are over here. There’s a line for a reason.”

They had only salmon steaks at the market, so we ended up at the local Monoprix supermarket to buy salmon fillets. This was
much safer territory for my mother—fluorescent lit with a reassuring number of things under plastic. “You should buy some
more,” my mother said. “What if someone wants seconds? We can eat it for lunch tomorrow. Or you can freeze it.”

“But I don’t
want
to eat leftovers.” I was on the verge of throwing a temper tantrum worthy of the two-year-old restacking yogurt containers
just in front of me. I realized how French my shopping habits had become. Particularly where protein is concerned, I now buy
only one serving per person. Have you seen the price? Besides, I don’t want lots of little mystery containers hiding in the
back of the fridge at the end of the week. There’s another wonderful market to go to tomorrow, and, it so happens, I get a
lot of pleasure out of it.

Portion size had been a particular source of contention since I started cooking for my parents in France. I come from a long
line of New York Jewish cooks—if you don’t have leftovers, you
didn’t make enough. The first time my parents had dinner in Saint-Malo, I could see the look of panic in my mother’s eyes
when Nicole brought out a single fish to serve six people and a bowl of rice that wouldn’t have added up to the leftovers
we took home from our local Chinese restaurant. My mother is a very good sport. When she is at Nicole’s, it’s
do as the Romans do
. But when she’s in her own daughter’s home, damn it, she wanted something to
eat
.

As I walked up and down the aisles looking for a jar of sun-dried tomatoes, she loaded up the cart. “Mom, we have to carry
all this.” She suddenly remembered that the car was not out back. She put the six-pack of San Pellegrino back on the shelf.

We were trudging up the stairs with the groceries. “It’s a good thing you live on the first floor,” she said, huffing up to
the landing with her bags. “Actually,” I said, “there might be a bigger apartment free just upstairs.” Her ears pricked up
with interest. We had been in our new apartment less than a year, but I could see the metal cogs turning in her head, the
neon sign flashing,
Baby’s Room, Baby’s Room.
“The owners are ready to sell,” I said, “and the price is amazing, but there seems to be a problem with the tenants.” I saw
her face fall as I explained. I could read her mind:
How is it that my only daughter ended up schlepping her own groceries and living below a Chinese Mafia brothel?

S
ETTING THE TABLE
, at least, was not a problem. My mother simply can’t stop bringing things. In my two-room Parisian apartment with one closet,
I now own an orange plastic egg poacher, a cake timer (shaped like a cake), five plastic spatulas, three sets of tongs, a
state-of-the-art lemon zester, and service for twelve in 1950s metallic ice-cream dishes. The Mixmaster is on its way. All
this is part of my mother’s “stuff is love” theory, which states
that if you transfer enough objects from your old home to your new home, you never left. It’s her own special form of denial,
silver plated.